In the margins: Reflections on scribbles, knowledge organization, and access (extended abstract)

Extended abstract: A favored text, dog-eared and yellowed from use, yet still useful, brings back insights that we try to impart to our students when we teach knowledge organization, organization and control of recorded information courses, whichever words we have chosen to label them. Scribbled in the margins 1 are notes to self, keywords, subject headings? “tags”? to remind us of why this particular passage was relevant to us. These scribbles include notes about the thoughts, subjects, eloquent linguistics that we wish to remember, and to access at a later time, maybe even our thoughts that occurred as we read the words. Should someone pick up this same text and read the passages and also the notes, would one necessarily draw the same conclusions, or would one have yet other insights into the author’s meanings, the scribbles, the words? 2 Wilson (1968) reminds us that “What a text says is not necessarily what it reveals or

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